Gangsters in Blue

Police are so loved and respected in this country, that even when they are rapists and murderers, they are treated better than the average human being, and certainly better than the average criminal. Recently examples are illustrative.

Jose Guerena, a former Marine who was the victim of a mistaken drug raid, was the target of 120+ rounds shot by Pima County Sherriff’s SWAT team. He was left to bleed to death, while his wife begged for medical attention, and eventually died because police refused to let paramedics through. Such is how police treated a suspected drug violator. (More here).

Neli Latson was wrongfully suspected of being a suspicious character with a gun. When he refused to submit to wrongful arrest, he was beaten by police. While being beaten, he yelled that he had done nothing wrong, to which the police replied,  “You don’t have to – Welcome to Stafford County.” Neli reported a gun was held to his head, and the officer stated, “I will blow your head off, nigger.” (More here and here). Such is how police treated a person suspected of exercising their 2nd Amendment (alleged) rights.

Fred Skinner, aged  76 was eating when police mistakenly burst through his door with guns drawn, put him in handcuffs, and ransacked his house in search of drugs. Police did not even stop to apologize when they realized they had entered and extensively damaged the wrong house, although when the matter attracted substantial media attention, they finally agreed to pay to repair Mr. Skinner’s porch. (More here). Such is how police treat an innocent old man minding his own business.

John Williams was walking down the street in the opposite direction with a small, folded whittling knife when Officer Ian Birk of Seattle Police Department called out for him to stop. Being deaf in one ear, Mr. Williams did not hear, and did not stop. He was executed on the spot.  (More here). Such is how police treat a person who dares disobey orders, even unreasonable ones.

18-year-old Ramarley Graham, was shot to death in front of his grandmother and younger brother after he attempted to flush a bag of marijuana down the toilet. Police did not have a warrant to enter the home, and Mr. Graham was unarmed. (More here and here). Such is how police treat drug offenders – and in a city where pot is allegedly “decriminalized.”

Alan Kephart disobeyed officers’ orders in connection with a traffic matter, and instead gave officers the middle finger. He was tasered to death. (More here). Such is how police treat traffic violators who are rude to them.

Kelly Thomas, a schizophrenic homeless man, attracted the attention of Fullerton police, who were allegedly looking for a suspected car thief matching his description. One glance at his face after police were done with him tells pretty much the whole story. He eventually died from his injuries. Such is how police treat people potentially suspected of car theft.

On the other hand, police themselves seem to rarely face such harsh consequences for minor transgressions. Indeed, they often face no consequences at all, and when they are charged and imprisoned, they are treated with a great deal of dignity and respect.

Officer Art Perea faced no consequences in relation to his employment when the accusations of rape surfaced. He was permitted to resign on his own accord, and ultimately faced no charges after investigations, which took several months, cleared him of wrongdoing. (More here). Such is how police treat a potential rapist among their ranks – they have such faith in him, that they don’t even bother to take him off duty, or quarantine him from the public.

Officer Anthony Arevalos similarly was accused of sexual assault. Although he was finally duly punished, he was not fired and faced no repercussions after he was accused of sexual assault for the first time. (More here). Again, such is how police treat rapists among their ranks.

In another particularly heinous tale, Officer Stephanie Lazarus of the LAPD was found to have been a major suspect in the brutal murder of Sherri Rasmussen, which occurred in 1986. Saliva and broken fingernails collected at the scene of the crime had been preserved. A detective secretly followed Lazarus and was able to retrieve a sample of her saliva from a straw she threw away. When the time came to arrest Lazarus in 2009, she was at her desk at the LAPD headquarters. She was told to go attend to an issue about an inmate in the jail downstairs. When she removed her gun and passed through the security gate, she was uneventfully intercepted by detectives and taken into interrogation. (More here).

When innocent people are suspected of crimes, they are regularly beaten, tasered, have their doors kicked in, their homes ransacked, or have their pets shot. When ordinary people have committed minor crimes, they are often tasered or shot and killed. However, when police rape and murder, they are treated with surprisingly reasonable measures (or maybe not so surprising – after all, the police essentially police themselves).

Perea was not beaten or tasered when accused of rape; he wasn’t even fired. Arevalos didn’t have his door kicked in and his house ransacked. Lazarus who was a violent, psychopathic murderer was disarmed non-violently, and faced neither a hail of 120+ rounds of bullets, tasers, fists, nor boots. This is not to say that murder suspects should be beaten, or that potential rapists should be tasered – but perhaps the rest of us are human beings as well, and should be treated in a similarly reasonable manner.

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Police who rape and murder are treated better than ordinary peons is a post from Cop Block - Badges Don't Grant Extra Rights

A police officer in the Chesapeake area addresses the Ryan Frederick case on his blog:

Ryan Frederick will forever be known as a cop killer. He shot and killed Detective Jerrod Shivers in January 2008 while the Chesapeake Police Department was serving a search warrant at his house. He is a cold blooded killer…

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury? You have FAILED MISERABLY. You have failed the family of Detective Shivers, police officers, the City of Chesapeake, Commonwealth of Virginia and this nation. Failed. Failures each and every one of you.

The next time you need police, please be sure to tell them you were on the Frederick jury. While that is an emotional statement, I do know that no matter what, the officers will still be professional. But I bet it made you stop and think didn’t it?

Just like all the people who have voted in the polls on PilotOnline. Voting for acquittal. The next time YOU need police, be sure to tell them you think that Frederick should have been let off for killing a cop.

Classy.

Congrats, Officer Sean Stewart. You are the latest embodiment of Justice Antonin Scalia’s “new police professionalism” in action.

See here (pdf), page five.

Prior posts on Milburn’s lawuit here and here.

Credit to commenter CharlesWT for the find.

So there’s been quite a bit of discusion around the Internet on the Dymond Milburn case since I posted on this Houston Press story this afternoon.  I guess if you aren’t used to these sorts of stories, it can seem a little implausible.  Which is why more than a few commenters at various sites have raised the possibility that the whole thing is a hoax.  If it is, it’s quite a hoax.  Like, on a Tawana Brawley scale.

So let’s clarify some misconceptions…

It’s all a hoax.

The lawsuit is very real. It was filed in August of this year.  Here’s a write-up from the Courthouse News Service from the day it was filed.  Here’s a copy (pdf) of the complaint.  If this is a hoax, Milburn, her family, and her attorney are going to great lengths to pull it off. Yes, her complaint likely paints what happened in a light quite favorable to her, and unfavorable to the police.  But I’d be very surprised if the major components of the complaint weren’t true.

This happened two years ago.  Why are you posting about it now?

The incident happened in August 2006.  The lawsuit was filed in August of this year.  Milburn’s attorney tipped off Houston Press reporter Chris Vogel, who wrote about the case yesterday.  I saw Vogel’s story, and blogged about the case today.

This is just one version of events, from Milburn’s lawyer.

Yes, and I made that clear in the post.  After I put up the post and talked to Vogel on the phone, he posted a response from the police officers’ lawyer, William Helfand.  You can read that here.

Here’s what isn’t in dispute:  Milburn was wrongly targeted during a prostitution raid.  The police were looking for white prostitutes.  Milburn is black.  She was apprehended by plain-clothes narcotics officers who emerged from a van as she stood outside her home.  She resisted.  The police have acknowledged they targeted the wrong house.  Three weeks later, Milburn was arrested at  her school, in front of her classmates, for “assaulting a public official.”  At some point, her father was arrested on a similar charge.  The judge declared a mistrial on the first day of Milburn’s trial.  According to Vogel, she’s scheduled to be tried again in February.

Milburn and her family are now suing the police officers who apprehended her.  They claim she was severely beaten during the raid.  According to the compliant, two hours after the raid, Milburn’s parents took her to a hospital, where doctors documented a host of nasty injuries.  I haven’t seen documentation of the hospital stay or the injuries, but if that’s all included in the complaint, I would assume it exists.

I called the Galveston police department and the Galveston district attorney’s office for comment.  I haven’t yet heard back from either.

Milburn has profiles on social networking sites that say she’s 17.  That means she would have been 15 at the time of the raid, not 12.

I’m not linking to a minor’s social networking page, particularly a minor who may have been the victim of abuse.  She doesn’t need a bunch of crazies trying to contact her.  Use Google, or check the comments if you’re interested, but yes, she does state in one of her profiles that she’s 17. My guess is that Milburn exaggerated her age, as teenage girls sometimes do on the Internet.  This high school track and field results page, found by a commenter, says she was born in 1993.  If her birthday falls later in the year than August, she would have been 12 at the time of the raid, as indicated in the complaint.

If it’s true, why hasn’t an outrageous story like this been picked up by the national media?

Why don’t 90 percent of the abuses of power we look at on this site get covered by the national media?  The lawsuit was filed in August of an election year.  A single instance of police misconduct in Galveston at that time would have quite a few other stories to compete with.  As to why the story wasn’t covered in 2006, Vogel tells me the raid took place in a low-income neighborhood.  I would guess that after a traumatic experience like that, and after the seemingly retributive arrest, the family was either too frightened to take their story to the media, or couldn’t get anyone to listen when they did.

I’ll post more information on this case as I learn of it.

Lots of interesting new information came out at a pre-trial hearing yesterday in Chesapeake, Virginia for Ryan Frederick, the man charged with capital murder for killing Det. Jarrod Shivers during a botched drug raid on Frederick’s home last January.

To briefly catch you up: Police were acting on an informant’s tip that Frederick was growing marijuana in his garage.  They found no plants, and only a misdemeanor amount of marijuana, which Frederick concedes was for personal use.  Both I and the Virginian-Pilot newspaper have since reported that the informant in the case, “Steven,” and another man who also says he was a police informant, Renaldo Turnbull, illegally broke into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid to look for probably cause, likely with the consent or at least the knowledge of the police.

Here’s what we learned yesterday:

• The State is now conceding that the police informant in the case illegally broke into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid.  Until now, they had either denied the connection or refused to comment.

• Frederick’s attorney released an audio recording taken in a police car shortly after the raid.  In it, Frederick tries to explain that he was confused and frightened because someone had broken into his home earlier in the week.  A police detective replies, “We know that.”  In a second recording, the detective says again, “First off, we know your house had been broken into. OK?”

• Yet according to the Virginian-Pilot, the State still insists that, “there is nothing whatsoever to suggest police knew at the time who broke in or who was involved. They said police learned months later that the parties involved included one of their informants.” (Emphasis mine.)

This doesn’t make any sense.  The affidavit the police filed to obtain the warrant notes that the police informant was in Frederick’s home three nights before the raid.  That’s exactly when the burglary happened.  The State is trying to argue that even though (a) the police knew their informant was in Frederick’s house three nights before the raid, and (b) the police knew someone had broken into Frederick’s home three nights before the raid, they apparently believed at the time that these two incidents were entirely coincidental, which is why they didn’t include on the search warrant affidavit the fact that their informant illegally broke into Frederick’s home to obtain probable cause.

There are two options here.  The Chesapeake police are either corrupt, or they’re naive to the point of incompetent.  The State apparently believes its case is better served by arguing the latter.

But there’s one other niggling detail that throws the State’s argument into a tailspin: Ryan Frederick never reported the break-in.  How, then, could the detective who questioned Frederick the night of the raid have known about it?

• Despite all of this, Judge Marjorie A.T. Arrington still denied a defense motion to suppress the warrant.  Which if nothing else I guess gives Frederick an early issue to put in his appeal should he be convicted.

• There’s now more than enough evidence to suggest that Chesapeake police had knowledge that the probable cause for the search warrant to Frederick’s home was obtained illegally.  Moreover, Turnbull’s interviews with me and with the Virginian-Pilot also raise the possibility that this wasn’t the first time a Chesapeake police informant burglarized a private residence to search for probable cause.  According to Turnbull, this was common practice.  And the police encouraged it.

It’s past time for an outside investigation, preferably from the Justice Department.

• Special Prosecutor Paul Ebert subpoenaed Virginian-Pilot reporter John Hopkins, the other journalist to speak to Turnbull. Ebert never called Hopkins to the stand. But the possibility that he could have caused Judge Arrington to bar Hopkins from the courtroom.  Hopkins—who has covered this case as well as I’ve seen any journalist cover one of these raids—now won’t be able to attend next month’s trial, either.

• The plants the informant Steven claimed to have found in Frederick’s home were never turned over to the police, and thus were never tested to confirm that they were actually marijuana. For all we know, they could still have been Japanese Maple saplings. Turnbull says Steven turned the plants over to the police.  The State is either arguing that the police didn’t know Turnbull and Steven removed the plants, or that they were aware, but never got around to asking Steven to turn them over.  Again, the choice here is corruption or incompetence.

That also means that this entire raid was conducted solely on the word of the informant Steven, a shady character who at the time was facing his own criminal charges for credit card fraud.  There were no controlled buys, and no significant surveillance.  The only corroborating investigation the police did were a few drive-bys of Frederick’s home. According to the affidavit, that should have lessened their suspicion, because they noted no unusual activity.

Prior posts on the Frederick case here.

UPDATE: Chesapeake-area blogger Rick Caldwell writes:

Ryan Frederick is being harassed by the city of Chesapeake, through code enforcement. His sister has recently moved back to the area, having lived overseas for several years. Since her arrival, she has received numerous notices from the city’s code enforcement division, regarding siding in disrepair, the condition of the pool in the back yard, and demanding the removal of two signs expressing support for Ryan from the front yard. The city has been sending these notices to Ryan at the jail as well, and is even threatening to sue over the pool.

Nice touch.

So the guy in the video below had two teeth chipped when, as you’ll see, the cop grabs him by the hair and slams his head into the pavement. After you watch, see if the tape jibes with the sworn testimony the police officers gave in court:

Before the Denver detectives knew about the videotape, they wrote reports and were deposed in court about what happened. Both officers said Heaney was throwing “wild punches” at them, hit the officers in the face and chest and continued to attack them, even when they had him on the ground.

Under oath, Cordova and Costigan also denied knowing anything about Heaney’s broken teeth.

Heaney’s attorney Lonn Heymann asked Cordova in court, “Was there a point at which somebody slammed his face into the ground?”

Cordova answered, “Absolutely not.”

“How did Mr. Heaney’s front teeth get broken,” asked Heymann.

Cordova replied, “I have not a clue.”

The internal police investigation couldn’t find a single witness to the incident. The TV station found three. I can see at least that many in the video.

The Denver Police Department said Monday it is conducting an internal investigation of the arrest.

“The investigation is underway, and no conclusions should be drawn until all of the facts are available and the totality of the circumstances can be considered,” said Division Chief of Investigations Dave Fisher. “Everyone in our country is initially entitled to a presumption of innocence, even police officers.”

True. It’s just too bad the cops didn’t show a lick of respect for Cordova’s rights.

Oh, and after the beating, Heaney was charged with second-degree assault on a police officer and “criminal mischief” for allegedly breaking one of the officer’s sunglasses. Those charges have now been dropped. But not for the video, he’d likely have been convicted.

Seems that the city of St. Louis, like many cities, allows the police to confiscate the cars of people suspected (but not necessarily convicted) of certain crimes. They have a contract with a city towing firm, and said firm was allowing police officers and their families to "rent" confiscated cars free of charge, sometimes for months on end. Officers and their families could also sometimes purchase the confiscated cars at a fraction of the cars’ value.

All of that is pretty outrageous. But it gets better.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch stumbled onto the story after investigating the daughter of the city’s police chief. She had been involved in a number of accidents with different cars. On several occasions she had wrecked a car, then simply gone down to the towing service to get a 60-80 percent discount on a new one. After one accident, her blood-alcohol concentration tested at .17. She wasn’t arrested or charged. The department says it has "no idea" why she was let go.

The police department hired a law firm, which concluded that the towing arrangement broke no rules or laws. The chief improbably claims he was oblivious to the deals his daughter was getting (her relationship with the towing service apparently goes back to 2002). The Post-Dispatch reports that the chief’s last public statement on the matter was that, "the absolute necessity in maintaining transparency in the eyes of the public."

He has since declined to comment.

(Via TheNewspaper.com)